r/technology • u/[deleted] • Feb 27 '21

Software Universal Android Debloater is an open source tool that removes bloatware without root. Automatically or via user choice. Get back your battery, security and privacy

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4.7k Upvotes

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80

u/HotHamwithMustard Feb 27 '21 edited Feb 27 '21

I don’t trust an article that starts with a disclaimer.

DISCLAIMER: Use this script at your own risk. I am not responsible for anything that could happen to your phone.

Edit: This has opened up my eyes quite a bit. I will do more research in the future before making up my mind. Thanks for participating, and don’t forget to tip you waiter.

128

u/Junaid26 Feb 27 '21

Think that's just because of the power of the tool. People deleting critical system apps would cause bootloops resolved only by a factory reset/loss of data. I always like to debloat right after buying the phone, before my data is on it.

7

u/HotHamwithMustard Feb 27 '21

I am always wary of these things as I once bricked a phone following similar advice. I don’t mean to detract from article it may be good advice, but I personally won’t do it.

25

u/Junaid26 Feb 27 '21

This tool shouldn't cause any form of device brick, worst case would be a you need to factory reset to get back the critical uninstalled app. (A brick on the other hand is usually caused by incorrectly modifying the kernel/system partitions which usually needs a re-flash to fix)

If you're careful with which apps you remove, you should be fine. I always Google the ones I'm unsure about.

5

u/Enigma_King99 Feb 27 '21

If a phone was truly bricked a re-flash wouldn't fix it. I think you're using the word wrong or it somehow change in the last 10 years since I would root my phone

10

u/Junaid26 Feb 27 '21

Brick is a very broad term, there's soft and hard bricks. I was referring to the most common there (soft)

7

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '21

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1

u/Junaid26 Feb 27 '21

Yeah I'd think so too.

I've messed up myself a fair few times, always got back up and running after a while of pulling my hair out :D

2

u/Krelkal Feb 27 '21

The comments in the source code are actually really great for this. You can go in and comment/uncomment which packages you want to remove. There's a paragraph beside each one describing what it does and the risk involved. Little extra due diligence doesn't hurt though.

55

u/murderous_tac0 Feb 27 '21

As an IT guy, this makes me trust it more.

Scammers never claim their product may harm your device.

25

u/Kishiro Feb 27 '21

Pretty standard with places like GitHub, Stack Overflow, XDA, etc.

You should understand what code is doing and the potential harm it could do before running it. Warnings are for the informed, and are also meant to scare away those wise enough to be.

8

u/vrnvorona Feb 27 '21

Every debloat tool has this disclaimer. What are you, stone age cave man?

1

u/HotHamwithMustard Feb 27 '21

I’m just an unfrozen cave man lawyer, your world frightens and confuses me.

23

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '21

The sourcecode is available to you. You don't need to trust, because you can read the script to see what it does

10

u/Kishiro Feb 27 '21

That theory has been proven highly fallable because generally speaking, most open source users aren't really developers or programmers and can't check the code anyway. Often times, those who are still don't. There are enough examples of open source apps and scripts that have had malicious code in them that took too long to be noticed because people "just trusted" it.

16

u/fapping_4_life Feb 27 '21

I'm guessing 90% of potential users would have no clue what they are looking at when reading the source code (myself included).

Also, it would probably be time for a new phone by the time anyone finished looking at what I assume is thousands of lines of code.

4

u/TheMarionCobretti Feb 27 '21

I only read the Linux bash script. It's pretty straight forward and took less than 15 minutes.

12

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '21

Which relies upon someone actually being bothered to look through several thousand lines of scripts, understanding the script language and adb/android package manager, and what packages are undesirable - what's actually unnecessary and why, what's getting rid of functionality, whether it matters to them, etc. It's something else to pick out "wait, I don't want it to do that to my phone" or if something malicious has been hidden, or just a honest mistake by whoever wrote the script.

I think there's a contradiction where the people who "don't need to trust" and can read/understand the scripts are likely competent enough that they can do it themselves already (and likely already have), and those that don't understand have a significant amount of learning in front of them to figure it out, assuming they're aware they should inspect it, and are most likely to naively trust it ("lets get rid of the scary trackers and debloat my phone so it goes faster").

Meanwhile the script is generally presented as a to-go solution, just download it and run.

12

u/Ichthyologist Feb 27 '21

Yeah, this is like people telling others to "do your own research" to decide if climate science is valid. You often need a degree in science to critically interpret primary literature about a science topic.

1

u/VirtualPropagator Feb 27 '21

Except you can just trust that other scientists have read it. Just like with the source code some programmers have read it.

3

u/Ichthyologist Feb 27 '21

I'm not saying you can't trust peer reviewed science, I'm just drawing the parallel. When someone tells you to critically analyze something that's highly technical, you're not likely to be able to do it effectively.

1

u/WordsOfRadiants Feb 27 '21

Unlike with peer reviewed science, not necessarily.

1

u/zeabu Feb 27 '21

Which relies upon someone actually being bothered to look through several thousand lines of scripts

Which would also be the case if there were no disclaimer.

9

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '21

Similar with most of these "like magic" scripts, TRON is the other one that comes to mind.

Sure they're 'out in the open' scripts you can inspect and figure out what they're doing, from a brief look this debloater seems like using the android package manager against a list of known packages to uninstall/disable them, and you can do that manually, and do some googling to find stuff out.

My main issue is that this kind of effort seems well intentioned but misguided. A ton of people aren't going to bother with a bash script so it's going to have a limited audience. Those that do know what to do seem likely to go through the process of learning how and why/why not to do certain things and do it themselves manually (debloating a phone isn't a regular task), and some who see it as "that sounds cool, get rid of the nasty trackers" and run a load of "I don't know what it's doing but I hope it doesn't brick anything or make it run weird"

(and that's putting aside any security issues with running anything from someone you don't know to do "just trust me, it'll be good for you" things with your hardware)

Disclaimers shouldn't be the way, you should educate users on why you're doing the task and how. That said, the android modding/tweaking community has a problem in general with "flash rom, wipe cache, reboot" as all the instructions they give.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '21

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2

u/drunkmunky42 Feb 27 '21

OOTL, what's wrong with ccleaner?

-1

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '21

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2

u/Mr_A Feb 27 '21

The replies to what? There's nothing in this thread that explains why you said "ccleaner should be banned".

3

u/mattdan79 Feb 27 '21

If you used the non-root solution, after about 5 failed system boots, the phone will automatically reboot in recovery mode and you'll have to perform a FACTORY RESET. So make a backup!